Chapter 22 - Dance

Summary

This chapter situates Vaughan Williams’s involvement with dance in a capacious network of literary, theatrical, choreographic, and visual associations. Dance – performed (such as ballet and modern solos) and participatory (such as folk dance and other forms of social dance) – is crucial to understanding conscious and subconscious efforts at cultural renewal in interwar Britain, efforts that in turn should be understood as a response to the devastation of the First World War and as part of the story of modernist experimentation. In this context, Vaughan Williams’s important composition for the ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing, first staged in 1931, having been premiered in Norwich as a concert work the year before, was a crucial contribution to interwar dance history. Job’s context is the vibrant, formative, intensely experimental interwar period of twentieth-century British dance history. Job belongs to what cultural historian Susan Jones calls ‘an important transitional moment in British dance’; new experiments in collaborative theatre and dance stirred excitement, and Job was staged amidst a creative ferment that intermingled British and continental artists and visions. Job shared with much experimental interwar British theatre a focus on daring and provocative experiments with dance drama as cultural commentary.